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> Are you allowed to run whatever computer program you want on the hardware you own? Yes. It is a basic human right. > This is a question where freedom, prac

> Are you allowed to run whatever computer program you want on the hardware you own? Yes. It is a basic human right. > This is a question where freedom, practicality, and reality all collide into a mess. No; it isn't. The answer is clear and not messy. If you are not allowed to run programs of your choice, then it is not your hardware. Practicality and "reality" (whatever that means) are irrelevant issues here. Maybe you prefer to use hardware that is not yours, but that is a different question.

mathiaspoint 1y ago
Or it's not a computer and really something more like a television. In that case these things should be thought of as a vice rather than a productivity tool. The social structure of the smartphone app ecosystem is remarkably similar to the cable provider -> network -> show situation from before too.
- cwillu 1y ago
  Only because of sustained pressure from all the usual suspects to try to make that the social structure.
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    I think it's always going to evolve that way when people are so concerned about "safety" (no matter how that's defined) that all the escape hatches are removed.
    - gumby271 1y ago
      Is it the people that are pushing for this though? Apple has long pushed privacy and security as a way to maintain their control over personal devices, the people just believe it and accept it. Google is just taking notes and seeing how profitable that approach is. Provided there's no push back, they'll succeed easily with no one actually asking for this.
- ninkendo 1y ago
  The example I always go to is a Nintendo or PlayStation, etc. They’re clearly just computers, they’re “hardware you own”, but you’ve never been able to run whatever software you want on them. But it’s been like this since the 1970’s and there’s never been an uproar over it. For me the difference is that you know what you’re getting into when you buy a console, and it’s clear up front that it’s not for “general” computing. I’m inclined to put smart phones into this category as well, but I can see how reasonable people may disagree here.
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    Those are not really personal computers, they're fancy set top boxes and extensions of the television.
    - ninkendo 1y ago
      They have the same hardware in them as a personal computer, and essentially always have. (The original Nintendo had the same CPU as an Apple II.) The difference is only how they were marketed, and the artificial limitations on what software you could run.
      - mathiaspoint 1y ago
        Right. They're vices and not tools even though they might look like tools.
  - gr4vityWall 1y ago
    Surely it would be better if console makers gave users freedom to control the device, rather than smartphones not being in the users' control either. Unfortunately, the copyright lobby of the video game industry was too strong in the 70s/80s/90s, so here we are.
  - microtonal 1y ago
    For me the difference is that you know what you’re getting into when you buy a console, and it’s clear up front that it’s not for “general” computing. I’m inclined to put smart phones into this category as well, but I can see how reasonable people may disagree here. I think there is a huge difference. You can perfectly live your life without a game console. Even if you are a game addict and it is absolutely necessary for you to live, you could buy a PC and game on that. Smartphones are a necessity nowadays. Some banks only have smartphone apps (or require a smartphone app to log in to their website). Some insurers want you to upload invoices with an app. Some governments require an app to log in (e.g. the Dutch DigiID). You need a smartphone to communicate with a lot of organizations and groups. Smartphones have become extremely essential. And two companies can decide what does and what doesn't get run on a smartphone and they can take their 30% over virtually everything. They can destroy a company by simply blocking their app on a whim (contrast with game studios, which could always publish their game for PC or Mac or whatever). It is not a healthy, competitive market. It is the market version of a dictatorship. And Google forbidding non-app store installs is making it worse. Governments should intervene to guarantee a healthy market (the EU is trying, but I think they are currently worried about the tariff wrath).
- martin-t 1y ago
  Increasingly, I keep noticing that all human-corporation relationships are a rehash of older power structures and basically struggles for power in which people gradually keep losing it until they realize they are exploited and then finally start fighting back. People started free and equal, then some specialized into warriors[0] and gradually built deeper and deeper hierarchical power structures, called themselves "nobles" and started exploiting the "commoners". At some point people snapped, killed a bunch of them (French revolution, US was for independence, etc.) and decided they wanna rule themselves. And then companies started getting bigger and bigger, with deeper hierarchical power structures, the "nobles" call themselves "executives" or "shareholders" and the people doing actual productive work are not longer "commoners", they are "workers"[1]. [0]: And thus controlled the true source of power - violence. [1]: Ironically admitting that people who are not workers are not doing real work, they are just redistributing other people's work and money.
  - Kim_Bruning 1y ago
    Some variant of Anacyclosis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY
    - martin-t 1y ago
      Can't watch the video now but partially. I don't like describing it as cycles because it is too simplistic and pretend it is inevitable, robbing people of agency. I prefer to think of society as a system where different actors have different goals and gradually lose/gain influence through a) slow processes where those with influence gain more from people who are sufficiently happy to be apathetic b) fast processes when people become sufficiently unhappy to reach for the source of all real world influence - violence. This happens because uneducated/dumb/complacent people let it happen. It can be prevented by teaching them the importance if freedoms and to always fight back. But that goes directly against the interests of those in power - starting from parents who want children to be obedient.
- jackothy 1y ago
  The problem is larger than just smart phones. Smart phones are the templates for all future devices. You car now runs Android as well. In the future, when your whole house is controlled by a computer, do you want that computer to be controlled by Google or to be controlled by yourself?
rafram 1y ago
That’s a great ideal, but Android is used both by sophisticated users who want a phone they can tinker with and the tech-illiterate grandparents of the world, who will never have a legitimate reason to install an app outside the Play Store, and who would never attempt to do that unless they were being guided by a scammer.
- microtonal 1y ago
  So, put a toggle somewhere. When the toggle is toggled, put up a big fat warning sheet and say if somebody on the phone or mail asks you to do that, 99.9% it's a scammer. If people still go for it, then it is their responsibility. A lot of things in life require responsibility because otherwise the results can be disastrous. But we don't forbid them, because it would be a huge violation of freedoms.
  - rafram 1y ago
    But it’s not someone on the phone - it’s their best friend / star-crossed lover who they met on WhatsApp because of a chance wrong-number text! Since then they’ve become incredibly close, and they can trust each other with anything. When their lover gives them some amazing investment advice and it requires clicking through a scary-looking prompt (like they do all the time on a phone), who do they trust - their one true love or a generic warning message on their phone? You have to take into account that the threat model here is vulnerable people, often older, being taken in by scammers who talk to them for weeks and gain their complete confidence. To the victims, it feels like a real romantic relationship, not someone who could even possibly be a scammer.
    - microtonal 1y ago
      The solution is not taking people's freedom away. The solution is education. Lesson 1: lovers are not for investment advise. Also, scams also happen outside smartphones. What's next? Are we going to revoke people's control over their financials because they might be scammed? Let's have the bank approve before we can do a transaction. And since we are using their payment platform, maybe they should also take 30%. Please stop feeding their narrative. Scammers are Google/Apple's "but think of the children".
hollerith 1y ago
I don't want to live in your overly simplistic world.
- fleshmonad 1y ago
  How is this overly simplistic? It is pretty simple. You buy some hardware, and some company wants to force you to use their telemetry ridden, data collecting software under the guise of stupid people being unable to do a google search and comparing a string. I can safely say I don't want to live in your technocratic techbro wet dream.
  - hollerith 1y ago
    Remote attestation is a useful capability. One example: it can be used to create a camera such that the photographer can prove that an image is an accurate recording of reality and not AI-generated. Without remote attestation, we will soon enter a state of affairs in which the courts (and anyone else, too) cannot ever rely on photographic or video evidence. The banking system has been relying on remote attestation for decades to ensure that devices used in settling financial transactions have not been tampered with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_4758 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_4758 Also, I think the chip-and-PIN cards used for most in-store transactions in Europe for the last 20 years rely on remote attestation and tamper resistance to prevent fraud. Finally, in the domain of desktop and laptop computers, there is a big security hole in that most components (certainly, disk drives and storage devices, but basically any peripheral or board) are essentially embedded computers that can be pwned with the result that they stayed pwned even if the owner of the computer installs the OS from scratch. One solution to this would be for suppliers of peripherals and boards to get much better at securing their products or to stop using microprocessor to implement their products, but it would be quite a lot of work (and governmental intervention or at least intervention by industry-wide quasi-governmental entities that currently do not exist) to get from the current situation to the one I just described. The only products currently available that are secure against this threat (aside perhaps from using 40-year-old computers) use verified-boot technology to implement the security. I.e., the only desktop and laptop computers you can buy where you can be reasonable sure some attacker hasn't installed malware in the computer's disk drive or track page or wifi module are things like Macs and Chromebooks, which implement the security using verified boot.
rikafurude21 1y ago
It seems that this is another one of those things where the lowest common denominator sets the rules for everyone. Most people arent tech savvy programmers so giving them the freedom to do 'whatever they want' will lead them to hurt themselves in some way. Of course this is not an excuse for locking down your hardware. Smartphones just came into being as a consumer-first product and didnt require many of the freedoms that programmers needed, which is why computers are fundamentally more open than smartphones. Apple of course is trying to change that with their Macs
- squigz 1y ago
  You don't need to be a "tech savvy programmer" to be aware of the risks on the Internet and not do stupid shit.
  - rikafurude21 1y ago
    https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
    - fleshmonad 1y ago
      Only that nothing about this requires big expertise. If you are a user of computers, you should be able to navigate the basics. It's the same like driving a car, you must know the traffic rules and how to behave, but that doesn't mean you have to understand how your engine works in detail.
      - rikafurude21 1y ago
        If you want to drive a car you go through driving school and have to pass the tests to get a drivers license. Theres no drivers license for the internet and not really any strict set of rules you have to follow in order to get online - most people pick up a sense for rules online by osmosis, usually about how to not get scammed or get malware - sometimes they have to learn by first hand experience. If we go by your comparison this would be like learning to drive by crashing a couple cars. I definitely believe anyone whos even a little tech savvy underestimates how complicated or confusing technology can be for the average person.
conradev 1y ago
Control over hardware isn’t actually the issue at stake here: many Android devices can unlock their bootloaders in a moderately safe way. Go nuts. It’s a more tricky issue where Google and other parties can restrict access to their services to devices they deem legitimate. Their services, their rules. Your hardware. Different arguments required. It’s everywhere: Widevine is used to prevent stealing 4K content (incl ATSC 3.0), gaming providers use it for anti-cheat, banks use it to rate limit abuse. It’s not just Android. (I say this as someone with an Apple Vision Pro running visionOS 1.0 with the hope to jailbreak it one day. I’m actually unable to do whatever I want to their hardware, unlike my Pixel phones.)
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  There are actually just about no services that genuinely need hardware attestation other than some DRMed music/video and zelle. Everything else pretty much works on Linux in a browser or has some substitute that does.
  - conradev 1y ago
    Yes, only some things for now! I hope it stays that way or decreases, but that’s not the way the arrow is pointing. Providers still implement it where they can, like for blackout restrictions for US sports games: impossible to enforce on the web because I can spoof location. Very possible to enforce on iOS because jailbreaking is not possible. Possible to enforce on Android because you can check if spoofing was made possible. It’s currently the primary reason I can’t play games online on Linux.
- fsflover 1y ago
  > many Android devices can unlock their bootloaders in a moderately safe way. And yet you can't install an alternative OS like Mobian, postmarketOS or PureOS due to the closed drivers and specs.
accle 1y ago
> > Are you allowed to run whatever computer program you want on the hardware you own? > Yes. It is a basic human right. Says who? What's your philosophical argument in favour of this?
- justinrubek 1y ago
  It's directly in the text. > hardware you own
  - accle 1y ago
    That's not an argument. Please explain how owning an item of hardware implies that running whatever computer program you want on it is a basic human right.
    - kartoffelsaft 1y ago
      If there are rooms in your house someone else could lock you out of, do you own the house or do they? If someone else could use your car without your permission, do you own the car or do they? If someone could grow their own plants in you back yard, do you own the garden or do they? If someone else could choose what programs run on your computer, do you own the computer or do they? Saying "basic human right" instead of just "basic right" may be odd, but definitionally, owning a thing means having the right to say how it is used. Either you own it and have that right, or you don't own it and don't have that right. That's what owning means.
      - shagie 1y ago
        There are parts of your car that you are not legally allowed to remove or disable (for example, the muffler or catalytic converter https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files/documents/exhsysrepair.pdf https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files... ). There are times when it is necessary to limit the rights that a individual has so that the system that the individual lives within can work. You can buy a radio transmitter, but you're not allowed to operate it without a license. You can likewise buy a car, but you aren't allowed to operate that either without a license. You do not have the right to modify your phone so that it acts as a radio frequency jammer. Possession of a device does not give an individual unrestricted rights to what can be done with it.
MrsPeaches 1y ago
What else do you consider basic human rights? My suspicion is: were you to list them, running programmes on hardware you own would be fairly low on that list.
- 2paz7x 1y ago
  So because it's low on the list it's not a right? Where do we draw the line? Let's do an experiment. Which rights can we take away from you? Some are pretty far down the list, right? The right to live is pretty important, so that's all the way up on the list. So where's the line drawn?

mathiaspoint 1y ago

Or it's not a computer and really something more like a television. In that case these things should be thought of as a vice rather than a productivity tool. The social structure of the smartphone app ecosystem is remarkably similar to the cable provider -> network -> show situation from before too.

cwillu 1y ago
Only because of sustained pressure from all the usual suspects to try to make that the social structure.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  I think it's always going to evolve that way when people are so concerned about "safety" (no matter how that's defined) that all the escape hatches are removed.
  - gumby271 1y ago
    Is it the people that are pushing for this though? Apple has long pushed privacy and security as a way to maintain their control over personal devices, the people just believe it and accept it. Google is just taking notes and seeing how profitable that approach is. Provided there's no push back, they'll succeed easily with no one actually asking for this.
ninkendo 1y ago
The example I always go to is a Nintendo or PlayStation, etc. They’re clearly just computers, they’re “hardware you own”, but you’ve never been able to run whatever software you want on them. But it’s been like this since the 1970’s and there’s never been an uproar over it. For me the difference is that you know what you’re getting into when you buy a console, and it’s clear up front that it’s not for “general” computing. I’m inclined to put smart phones into this category as well, but I can see how reasonable people may disagree here.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  Those are not really personal computers, they're fancy set top boxes and extensions of the television.
  - ninkendo 1y ago
    They have the same hardware in them as a personal computer, and essentially always have. (The original Nintendo had the same CPU as an Apple II.) The difference is only how they were marketed, and the artificial limitations on what software you could run.
    - mathiaspoint 1y ago
      Right. They're vices and not tools even though they might look like tools.
- gr4vityWall 1y ago
  Surely it would be better if console makers gave users freedom to control the device, rather than smartphones not being in the users' control either. Unfortunately, the copyright lobby of the video game industry was too strong in the 70s/80s/90s, so here we are.
- microtonal 1y ago
  For me the difference is that you know what you’re getting into when you buy a console, and it’s clear up front that it’s not for “general” computing. I’m inclined to put smart phones into this category as well, but I can see how reasonable people may disagree here. I think there is a huge difference. You can perfectly live your life without a game console. Even if you are a game addict and it is absolutely necessary for you to live, you could buy a PC and game on that. Smartphones are a necessity nowadays. Some banks only have smartphone apps (or require a smartphone app to log in to their website). Some insurers want you to upload invoices with an app. Some governments require an app to log in (e.g. the Dutch DigiID). You need a smartphone to communicate with a lot of organizations and groups. Smartphones have become extremely essential. And two companies can decide what does and what doesn't get run on a smartphone and they can take their 30% over virtually everything. They can destroy a company by simply blocking their app on a whim (contrast with game studios, which could always publish their game for PC or Mac or whatever). It is not a healthy, competitive market. It is the market version of a dictatorship. And Google forbidding non-app store installs is making it worse. Governments should intervene to guarantee a healthy market (the EU is trying, but I think they are currently worried about the tariff wrath).
martin-t 1y ago
Increasingly, I keep noticing that all human-corporation relationships are a rehash of older power structures and basically struggles for power in which people gradually keep losing it until they realize they are exploited and then finally start fighting back. People started free and equal, then some specialized into warriors[0] and gradually built deeper and deeper hierarchical power structures, called themselves "nobles" and started exploiting the "commoners". At some point people snapped, killed a bunch of them (French revolution, US was for independence, etc.) and decided they wanna rule themselves. And then companies started getting bigger and bigger, with deeper hierarchical power structures, the "nobles" call themselves "executives" or "shareholders" and the people doing actual productive work are not longer "commoners", they are "workers"[1]. [0]: And thus controlled the true source of power - violence. [1]: Ironically admitting that people who are not workers are not doing real work, they are just redistributing other people's work and money.
- Kim_Bruning 1y ago
  Some variant of Anacyclosis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqsBx58GxYY
  - martin-t 1y ago
    Can't watch the video now but partially. I don't like describing it as cycles because it is too simplistic and pretend it is inevitable, robbing people of agency. I prefer to think of society as a system where different actors have different goals and gradually lose/gain influence through a) slow processes where those with influence gain more from people who are sufficiently happy to be apathetic b) fast processes when people become sufficiently unhappy to reach for the source of all real world influence - violence. This happens because uneducated/dumb/complacent people let it happen. It can be prevented by teaching them the importance if freedoms and to always fight back. But that goes directly against the interests of those in power - starting from parents who want children to be obedient.
jackothy 1y ago
The problem is larger than just smart phones. Smart phones are the templates for all future devices. You car now runs Android as well. In the future, when your whole house is controlled by a computer, do you want that computer to be controlled by Google or to be controlled by yourself?

rafram 1y ago

That’s a great ideal, but Android is used both by sophisticated users who want a phone they can tinker with and the tech-illiterate grandparents of the world, who will never have a legitimate reason to install an app outside the Play Store, and who would never attempt to do that unless they were being guided by a scammer.

microtonal 1y ago
So, put a toggle somewhere. When the toggle is toggled, put up a big fat warning sheet and say if somebody on the phone or mail asks you to do that, 99.9% it's a scammer. If people still go for it, then it is their responsibility. A lot of things in life require responsibility because otherwise the results can be disastrous. But we don't forbid them, because it would be a huge violation of freedoms.
- rafram 1y ago
  But it’s not someone on the phone - it’s their best friend / star-crossed lover who they met on WhatsApp because of a chance wrong-number text! Since then they’ve become incredibly close, and they can trust each other with anything. When their lover gives them some amazing investment advice and it requires clicking through a scary-looking prompt (like they do all the time on a phone), who do they trust - their one true love or a generic warning message on their phone? You have to take into account that the threat model here is vulnerable people, often older, being taken in by scammers who talk to them for weeks and gain their complete confidence. To the victims, it feels like a real romantic relationship, not someone who could even possibly be a scammer.
  - microtonal 1y ago
    The solution is not taking people's freedom away. The solution is education. Lesson 1: lovers are not for investment advise. Also, scams also happen outside smartphones. What's next? Are we going to revoke people's control over their financials because they might be scammed? Let's have the bank approve before we can do a transaction. And since we are using their payment platform, maybe they should also take 30%. Please stop feeding their narrative. Scammers are Google/Apple's "but think of the children".

hollerith 1y ago

I don't want to live in your overly simplistic world.

fleshmonad 1y ago
How is this overly simplistic? It is pretty simple. You buy some hardware, and some company wants to force you to use their telemetry ridden, data collecting software under the guise of stupid people being unable to do a google search and comparing a string. I can safely say I don't want to live in your technocratic techbro wet dream.
- hollerith 1y ago
  Remote attestation is a useful capability. One example: it can be used to create a camera such that the photographer can prove that an image is an accurate recording of reality and not AI-generated. Without remote attestation, we will soon enter a state of affairs in which the courts (and anyone else, too) cannot ever rely on photographic or video evidence. The banking system has been relying on remote attestation for decades to ensure that devices used in settling financial transactions have not been tampered with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_4758 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_4758 Also, I think the chip-and-PIN cards used for most in-store transactions in Europe for the last 20 years rely on remote attestation and tamper resistance to prevent fraud. Finally, in the domain of desktop and laptop computers, there is a big security hole in that most components (certainly, disk drives and storage devices, but basically any peripheral or board) are essentially embedded computers that can be pwned with the result that they stayed pwned even if the owner of the computer installs the OS from scratch. One solution to this would be for suppliers of peripherals and boards to get much better at securing their products or to stop using microprocessor to implement their products, but it would be quite a lot of work (and governmental intervention or at least intervention by industry-wide quasi-governmental entities that currently do not exist) to get from the current situation to the one I just described. The only products currently available that are secure against this threat (aside perhaps from using 40-year-old computers) use verified-boot technology to implement the security. I.e., the only desktop and laptop computers you can buy where you can be reasonable sure some attacker hasn't installed malware in the computer's disk drive or track page or wifi module are things like Macs and Chromebooks, which implement the security using verified boot.

rikafurude21 1y ago

It seems that this is another one of those things where the lowest common denominator sets the rules for everyone. Most people arent tech savvy programmers so giving them the freedom to do 'whatever they want' will lead them to hurt themselves in some way. Of course this is not an excuse for locking down your hardware. Smartphones just came into being as a consumer-first product and didnt require many of the freedoms that programmers needed, which is why computers are fundamentally more open than smartphones. Apple of course is trying to change that with their Macs

squigz 1y ago
You don't need to be a "tech savvy programmer" to be aware of the risks on the Internet and not do stupid shit.
- rikafurude21 1y ago
  https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
  - fleshmonad 1y ago
    Only that nothing about this requires big expertise. If you are a user of computers, you should be able to navigate the basics. It's the same like driving a car, you must know the traffic rules and how to behave, but that doesn't mean you have to understand how your engine works in detail.
    - rikafurude21 1y ago
      If you want to drive a car you go through driving school and have to pass the tests to get a drivers license. Theres no drivers license for the internet and not really any strict set of rules you have to follow in order to get online - most people pick up a sense for rules online by osmosis, usually about how to not get scammed or get malware - sometimes they have to learn by first hand experience. If we go by your comparison this would be like learning to drive by crashing a couple cars. I definitely believe anyone whos even a little tech savvy underestimates how complicated or confusing technology can be for the average person.

conradev 1y ago

Control over hardware isn’t actually the issue at stake here: many Android devices can unlock their bootloaders in a moderately safe way. Go nuts. It’s a more tricky issue where Google and other parties can restrict access to their services to devices they deem legitimate. Their services, their rules. Your hardware. Different arguments required. It’s everywhere: Widevine is used to prevent stealing 4K content (incl ATSC 3.0), gaming providers use it for anti-cheat, banks use it to rate limit abuse. It’s not just Android. (I say this as someone with an Apple Vision Pro running visionOS 1.0 with the hope to jailbreak it one day. I’m actually unable to do whatever I want to their hardware, unlike my Pixel phones.)

mathiaspoint 1y ago
There are actually just about no services that genuinely need hardware attestation other than some DRMed music/video and zelle. Everything else pretty much works on Linux in a browser or has some substitute that does.
- conradev 1y ago
  Yes, only some things for now! I hope it stays that way or decreases, but that’s not the way the arrow is pointing. Providers still implement it where they can, like for blackout restrictions for US sports games: impossible to enforce on the web because I can spoof location. Very possible to enforce on iOS because jailbreaking is not possible. Possible to enforce on Android because you can check if spoofing was made possible. It’s currently the primary reason I can’t play games online on Linux.
fsflover 1y ago
> many Android devices can unlock their bootloaders in a moderately safe way. And yet you can't install an alternative OS like Mobian, postmarketOS or PureOS due to the closed drivers and specs.

accle 1y ago

> > Are you allowed to run whatever computer program you want on the hardware you own? > Yes. It is a basic human right. Says who? What's your philosophical argument in favour of this?

justinrubek 1y ago
It's directly in the text. > hardware you own
- accle 1y ago
  That's not an argument. Please explain how owning an item of hardware implies that running whatever computer program you want on it is a basic human right.
  - kartoffelsaft 1y ago
    If there are rooms in your house someone else could lock you out of, do you own the house or do they? If someone else could use your car without your permission, do you own the car or do they? If someone could grow their own plants in you back yard, do you own the garden or do they? If someone else could choose what programs run on your computer, do you own the computer or do they? Saying "basic human right" instead of just "basic right" may be odd, but definitionally, owning a thing means having the right to say how it is used. Either you own it and have that right, or you don't own it and don't have that right. That's what owning means.
    - shagie 1y ago
      There are parts of your car that you are not legally allowed to remove or disable (for example, the muffler or catalytic converter https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files/documents/exhsysrepair.pdf https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files... ). There are times when it is necessary to limit the rights that a individual has so that the system that the individual lives within can work. You can buy a radio transmitter, but you're not allowed to operate it without a license. You can likewise buy a car, but you aren't allowed to operate that either without a license. You do not have the right to modify your phone so that it acts as a radio frequency jammer. Possession of a device does not give an individual unrestricted rights to what can be done with it.

MrsPeaches 1y ago

What else do you consider basic human rights? My suspicion is: were you to list them, running programmes on hardware you own would be fairly low on that list.

2paz7x 1y ago
So because it's low on the list it's not a right? Where do we draw the line? Let's do an experiment. Which rights can we take away from you? Some are pretty far down the list, right? The right to live is pretty important, so that's all the way up on the list. So where's the line drawn?